Haiti

The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier

By Amy Wilentz

Vintage. 427 pp., $17.95 (pb)

Reviewed by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/8120

Is there light at the end of Haiti's 500-year long tunnel, which that country entered following its first contact with Columbus and the West in 1492? Some see hope in a US invasion of Haiti which reinstates as president the democratically elected leftish priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was ousted in a coup seven months after taking office in 1991.

Most Haitians, as Amy Wilentz reports in her book, disagree — nothing that any of Haiti's predators, from the Spanish colonists and French slavers to the US business class, have done to the country has been benign or in any way beneficial to the poor of Haiti.

Wilentz first visited Haiti in 1986 in the midst of a popular uprising which unseated the brutal despot, Jean-Claude Duvalier. With his father, Francois, before him, the Duvalier family had ruled Haiti for 30 years in a "bloodthirsty, corrupt dictatorship". It had evoked a political resistance and profound radicalisation by Haiti's poor that was sufficient for the US to spirit "Baby-Doc" Duvalier away as a bad risk to that "stability" which US overseas investors prize.

Aristide, "a slight young priest in a slum parish" at the time, was at the head of the insurgent people, inspiring them, with his personal courage and fiery sermons, to a cleansing from Haiti of Duvalier and his personal militia and goon squad, the Tontons Macoute.

The Haitian people thought they had succeeded, but many Tontons Macoute lay low and the army retained power. With the guidance of the "long arm of the State Department and the CIA", a series of dictators has reigned, up to the current Raoul Cedras, maintaining business rule through repression. "What we have", said Aristide as he went into hiding after dodging assassination attempts and massacres during his church services, "is Duvalierism without Duvalier".

Wilentz struggles to cope with a feeling of depression when reflecting on this "recycling of Haiti's favourite nightmare" of coup and counter-coup in "the endlessly ongoing, endlessly thwarted Haitian liberation". Her fatalism, however, is more than balanced by the hope inspired by the organisation which the poor continually display despite repression — the peasant collectives, neighbourhood committees, popular tribunals, barricades, workers' vigilance committees and alliances of democratic political parties.

The major barrier to the success of these efforts, Wilentz believes, is the US. She cites two former US secretaries of state — Henry Kissinger and Cyrus Vance — who wrote that US political and economic aims for Haiti are to "reduce the risks of extremist political infection and radical contamination" (decoded: any political tendency which redirects some of Haiti's resources towards the poor majority, thus preventing unbridled robbery by US business bandits).

The means approved by the US include terror under the dictatorship of the generals or, when this proves ineffective or threatens social upheaval, a version of parliamentary democracy which restores but neutralises Aristide (with his "troubling asset" of 67% of the vote in Haiti's only free election) by leaving power in the hands of the army, the US in military occupation and a reminder of who is the real power in the region.

Wilentz's accounts of Haiti's misery, massacres and repression are powerful. She clearly targets Aristide's enemies — "the Army, the American Embassy, the Church hierarchy, the very wealthy few" — as responsible for Haiti being the poorest country in the western hemisphere, with 60% unemployment, 80% illiteracy, forest cover down from 75% of the country to 7%, the AIDS carnage and similar horrors.

Arrayed against this bleakness is "the popular energy that could save a nation". This displayed itself in the successful slave revolt against France in 1804, which established the first black republic in history, the protests which forced out the US Marines from their occupation of 1915-34 and the uprising which toppled Duvalier in 1986.

Wilentz's dramatic historical sweep and her compassion for the poor she befriends, restores to the Haitians, without romanticising them, their full humanity, dignity and political vitality. Toussaint L'Ouverture, the leader of the slave revolt 200 years ago, wrote of Haiti's "tree of liberty", so often cut down but "springing up again by the roots for they are numerous and deep".

This tree of liberty beckons at the end of Haiti's dark tunnel, and Clinton will not be its gardener but its executioner. He faces a considerable obstacle in the exploited of Haiti. Wilentz is certain their time will come.